RED ON RED
DRACO
Present Day…
The rain had been at the city since noon, and I watched it through the tinted glass of the back seat without much in the way of opinion. Mateo was driving, and he took the corner onto the side street a touch faster than necessary, because he had decided some time ago that I enjoyed it.
“Two minutes, boss,” he said, glancing at me in the mirror.
Amara was beside me, phone face-down on her knee.
Across from us Elias had the Red Ledger open across his thigh, his pen making the small dry scratch that had been the soundtrack of my evenings for the better part of a century.
Rowan rode up front, silent, watching the wing mirror, and he had not spoken since we left the house, as he rarely did.
The car slid to the curb and Mateo killed the engine.
“Open,” I said.
Rowan pulled the door open, and the rain came in with the noise of the street.
The line at the velvet rope had been waiting since nine.
I felt the small collective shift that ran along the queue when a face that knew enough recognized me, and someone toward the back made a sound that might have been my name and might have been a prayer.
In this city, those were not always distinguishable.
Amara stepped up at my left, and Rowan, Mateo, and Elias fell in behind. The doorman was new, which meant Celeste had approved him and I had not. He stepped aside, lowered his eyes, and said nothing, which was the correct response.
The Crimson Room lived under a cocktail lounge that lived under a restaurant, three floors of decreasing legality stacked like a layered cake, and most of the city did not know the bottom one existed. The ones who knew it behaved, because they had to. House rules.
The upper bar was a soft murmur of money and perfume, and I walked through it without slowing. The hostess at the inner door did not greet me, because she had learned; she pressed the panel behind the bookshelf, the wall opened, and the music below rose to meet us.
The half-curtained booths along the edges were occupied: vampires at the back in clothes a decade too fine for the year; two shifters in the corner booth I had set aside for the Castellan delegation, working through a decanter that was not theirs to open; a witch at the bar doing a poor job of not looking like she had come to sell her wares; and a handful of mortals who had paid the fee and signed the waiver and would wake in the morning remembering only what I let them keep.
I stopped just inside the room. Conversations at the nearest tables did not stop, because nobody was that stupid, but they thinned. The bartender on the near end, a young vampire named Patrick, glanced up, found me, and looked back down at the cocktail he was pouring.
I did not enjoy being looked at, though I had long ago stopped resenting it. It was a transaction: they looked, I let them, and then we moved on.
“Floor's hot tonight,” Amara said beside me. “Booth four's our friend from the Heights. Booth eleven is somebody I don't know, which I don't like.”
“Find out. And whoever's paying for eleven's silence, I want their name before I want theirs.”
“On it.”
Patrick's pulse was wrong. He had been overserved, perhaps, or undersold, or had got himself into trouble he should not have, and I would deal with him later.
The security man at the rear door stood with his weight on the wrong foot.
The private door to room three was not flush in its frame; it had been left ajar sometime in the last hour and never properly reset.
And at the second booth from the dance floor a thin blond man was laughing too loudly, a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth that had no business being there.
“Elias.”
He was at my elbow before the syllable had finished. “Boss.”
“That booth and the blond. Find out who served him and how.”
“On it.”
“Amara.”
“Rowan's already on the rear door,” Amara replied. “I'll take the back office and pull the night log.”
“Good. Patrick, too. His pulse is off, so find out why before his shift ends.”
“Understood,” she said, and went.
The dance floor opened a corridor for me without anyone breaking step.
The floor manager I wanted was at the bar's far end, leaning to talk to the second bartender with his back half-turned.
He had been with the Crimson Room eleven months, good at the part of the job that involved smiling at expensive people and apparently very bad at not letting fresh vampire blood walk out of a private booth onto the public floor of my house.
He saw me coming three seconds too late.
“Mr. Reed,” he said.
“Don't.”
He swallowed. I leaned in enough that the words would not need to travel.
“You let a mortal walk out of a private booth with another vampire's blood on his face,” I said.
“Sir, I…”
“No.” I let that sit. “Booth three's door has been open since the last set change, which means whoever was meant to seal it did not, and you, who are responsible for them, did not check.”
“I…”
“That was not a question.”
He stopped talking, his mouth trembling very slightly at one corner, and the bartender beside him had gone perfectly still.
“You mistook my rules for suggestions. That was your error, and I will not make a second one by keeping you. Take your jacket and walk out the staff door without speaking to anyone, and do not come back to this building, for any reason, ever. If I find you in another of my rooms, in this city or any other, I will not waste the breath to warn you first. Go.”
“Mr. Reed, please, my…”
I looked at him.
He went.
Amara had already drifted up at my elbow. “I'll handle the booth,” she said.
“Quietly.”
The office sat above the club at the end of a short corridor that very few people in this city had ever walked.
The door was unmarked, and the lock had no key; it read me when I touched it and opened, and behind it the noise of the room below dropped to a held thud in the floorboards, like a heartbeat through a wall.
I took my coat and gloves off, slowly.
The man waiting for me was already sweating. He sat on the low chair I kept near the window for exactly this purpose, where Rowan had put him and had not tied him.
His name was Hollis, and he had run product for me on the West Side for three years. Two months ago he had begun carrying someone else's alongside mine, which was its own offense; one month ago he had begun cutting mine with theirs, which was a different offense entirely.
“Mr. Reed, listen, I… I know how this looks, I know, but you gotta hear me out, there's been some confusion with the suppliers, there's a guy in Yonkers been…”
“Sit back.”
“Sir…”
“Sit. Back.”
He sat back. I went to the cabinet and poured myself a glass of the Barolo.
“Mr. Hollis.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you think I would not smell another man's blood on my money?”
His mouth opened and closed. “I didn't… I never… Mr. Reed, I would never…”
“You did. We have established as much, so we are past that part of the conversation. What concerns me now is whether you understood, when you did it, that I would notice, because there are two kinds of men who steal from me, Mr. Hollis. There are men who think I am stupid, and there are men who think I am tired. I want to know which one you are.”
“Neither, sir, neither, I swear on my…”
“Don't swear on your mother. I don't know her and I don't care about her. I asked you a question, and you are giving me a poor answer.”
He started to cry, which was undignified. I have, over the years, become unmoved by the sight of grown men crying in this room.
“I'll pay all of it back, every cent, with interest, I'll…”
“You will, yes, from your accounts. Helena has already filed the paperwork.”
“Then… then we're…”
“We are not. Paying back what you stole settles the money, Mr. Hollis. It does not settle what your cutting my product could have cost me with the people who buy it. That debt is not one you can work off.”
“Mr. Reed, please, please, I have a kid, I have a—”
“You should have remembered him on Tuesday, when you decided his father was also a thief.”
I came around the desk. There was nowhere for him to go, and we both knew it. I put my hand against the side of his throat and he flinched, and I rested my fingers where the pulse was, let the centuries come up into my voice, and put the words in beneath his thinking.
“Be still,” I said.
His heart stopped. He sat back down, and his chest did not rise.
I took my hand back, returned to my chair, and drank the rest of the Barolo. After a moment the door opened and Amara stepped in, and she looked at Hollis, then at me, then at the glass on the desk.
“Remove him,” I said. “And find me whoever told him he was clever enough to do this.”
“Already tracking it.” She tilted her head at the door, and Rowan came in behind her without being called. He stood in the doorway for a half-second and then Hollis was in his hands and gone.
“Get a new bottle up here,” I said. “The one I had was fine. I just want a new one.”
I sat at my desk and did not move for perhaps a full minute. Then I rose and went to the window. The one-way pane along the west wall looked down through tinted glass onto the dance floor at an angle, and I had stood at it more nights than I could count.
And then I saw him.
He was not unremarkable. He was on the floor near the center, dancing with a girl in a green slip and another in nothing much at all, and he was laughing.
I watched him laugh. He did not look like a man with a debt, but like one who had already decided the debt was not his problem.
“Elias.”
Elias appeared next to me. “Boss.”
“That one.”
“Which one?”
“The one in the center with an open shirt.”
He paged the ledger without looking down at it.
“Remy Venn. Twenty-six. Blood debt to the house through Ilya's line, transferred to us in the consolidation last spring. Three extensions. Two missed payments. One written warning, which he signed. One verbal warning, which I delivered personally on the twelfth.”
“He should not be in this building.”
“No, sir.”
“Find out who let him in.”
“Of course.”
I watched Remy dance for perhaps another ten seconds. “Collect him,” I said to Rowan.
By the time they got him through my door, his nose was bleeding and the smile was off his face.
They put him in the chair Hollis had been in.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, no, no, no. Listen, listen, there's been… there's been a mistake, okay, I was gonna come in tomorrow, I had it, I had the money, I just…”
“Mr. Venn.”
“I just needed to… I needed one more night, that's all, just one—”
I let the silence do what a second warning would have. His mouth kept moving a beat after the sound had stopped coming out of it, and then he caught up with himself and went quiet.
Mateo took one slow step back from the chair and put his hands behind him, and Rowan moved to the door and stayed there.
I sipped the new wine Amara had sent up. It was, in fact, better than the first.
“You came into my club wearing my product on your tongue, owing me money you have not paid, after three extensions, two missed payments, and a written warning you signed in your own hand.
You danced on my floor. You laughed. You let strange women put their fingers in the collar of your shirt, where, if I am not mistaken, there is a healing bite from a vampire who is not on my approved list, a list that exists because a vampire's blood is not a gift and its distribution in this city is a political act. Tell me, Mr. Venn. Which part of that did you imagine I was going to find charming.”
“I… Mr. Reed, sir, I swear, I…”
“You have spent my patience. By sunrise tomorrow you will either pay what you owe me, in full, or your parents will settle the balance for you in blood. Do you understand?”
His face lost all its color. “My… my parents…”
“Yes.”
“They don't even… they don't know… they don't know about any of this, they…”
“That is not relevant to me. You built this debt without consulting them. I see no reason to collect it any differently.”
“Please.”
He slid off the chair and onto his knees before Mateo could decide whether to stop him, and he put his hands flat against the desk and looked up at me. I looked back, and his eyes stopped me for a half-second I could not account for.
“Three days, Mr. Reed, please, I can get it in three days, I swear on my… I swear on anything, anything you want, please, I'll do anything, just… just don't, don't touch them, please…”
I considered him. He believed his own promise, in the way addicts always did.
“Three days,” I said.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, oh god, thank…”
“Be quiet.”
He went quiet.
I rose and came around the desk, and I crouched, slowly, until my face was level with his.
“Look at me, Mr. Venn.”
He looked.
“You will find what you owe me. You will not run. You will not hide. You will not take so much as another sip of what put that smile on your face tonight, because if you do, I will know, and I will be at your door before you have finished swallowing. You will remember, for the next three days, that mercy is only beautiful to men who have never had to spend it. Do you understand?”
His pupils widened, and the compulsion sank into him.
“I understand.”
“Say it again.”
“I understand.”
“Good.”
I stood. “Mateo. Take him out the back. Watch him into the building before you leave.”
“Yes, boss.”
“And clean his face first. He's bleeding on the carpet.”
“Yeah.”
I heard them go. I watched the rain on the glass and the faint red wash of the club beneath my feet, and I drank the rest of the wine, and the thread sat where I had left it. I poured another glass and went back to work.